Looking for X

By Deborah Ellis

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award

In this urban adventure story, Khyber, a smart, bold, eleven-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood, sets out to find her friend X, a mysterious homeless woman who has gone missing.

The desperate search takes Khyber on a long, all-night odyssey that proves to be wilder than any adventure she has ever imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Groundwood Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781554980222

Deborah Ellis

DEBORAH ELLIS is the author of The Breadwinner, which has been published in thirty languages. She has won the Governor General’s Award, the Middle East Book Award, the Peter Pan Prize, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award and the Vicky Metcalf Award. A recipient of the Order of Canada, Deborah has donated more than $2 million in royalties to organizations such as Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, Mental Health Without Borders and the UNHCR. She lives in Simcoe, Ontario.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

WHO WE ARE

Mom used to be a stripper.

She quit when I came along. She calls it exotic dancing, which isn’t quite right. It is dancing, but exotic doesn’t mean dancing while you take your clothes off. Inuit dancing could be exotic, but that’s not what Mom did.

She made good money at it, but it all sort of drained away. Before I was born, she was poor, and we’ve been poor ever since.

A lot of people think that just because Mom used to be a stripper, her children are screwed up and will stay screwed up forever. Not so. My brothers would have been the way they are no matter how Mom paid her rent.

If I’m screwed up when I become an adult, it will be my own fault. If I’m screwed up now — well, I’m not, so there’s nothing more to say about that.

Sometimes strippers get to travel. I’d like that. Mom says, though, that in all her years of traveling as a dancer, all she saw of the world were two-bit Ontario towns and their two-bit taverns, and there’s more to the world than that.

As if I need to be reminded.

I asked Mom once if she thought being an exotic dancer would be a good career for me. She said definitely not.

It involves dressing up in frilly things, which you hate, and working in nightclubs full of cigarette smoke, which would be bad for your lungs.

She also said I’d have to deal with a lot of jerks. I wouldn’t mind that so much. I deal with a lot of jerks now. I’m pretty good at it, for an eleven-year-old.

Anyway, I nixxed the idea of becoming an exotic dancer. For awhile I wanted to be a truck driver, then an airplane pilot, then a sailor. The problem, though, with all those careers, is that you have somebody telling you what to do, and you actually have to do work.

I don’t like to work, and I certainly don’t like anybody telling me what to do.

What I really like to do is wander around and look at things, and then think about them.

It was Mom who first said I should be an explorer, and as soon as she said that, I knew it was true.

I’m going to explore everything, all over the world, from the biggest country to the tiniest island. I already have my own atlases. I’ll see things no one else has ever seen, or ever will see. I’ll have a new adventure every half hour, and everybody else’s life will be really boring compared to mine.

When I take a break in my explorations, I might, if I was begged, agree to give a lecture on what I’ve seen, but only if someone gives me a lot of money, treats me like a big shot and buys me a nice dinner.

Mom’s name is Tammy, which means perfection. She reminds me of that whenever I disagree with her.

She lets me call her Tammy, or Mom, or Mommy (although I only call her that when I’m not feeling well). She hates being called Tam. She says my father used to call her that when he wanted something, like, Hey, Tam. Make me a sandwich. She doesn’t like thinking about my father, even though she’s probably reminded of him every time she looks at me. I look like him.

You remind me of you, Tammy said once, when I asked her about it. Worry about something worth worrying about.

My brothers look like Tammy. I’m glad they don’t look like their father. I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me, and I was glad to see him leave when Tammy told him she was pregnant.

My name is Khyber. It’s not the name I was given when I was born. That name is so unspeakably horrible that I shall never speak it, not even under torture.

Khyber is the name I have given myself, and Khyber is what everybody calls me. Tammy even registered me at school that way.

Tammy prefers my unspeakable name (naturally, since she chose it), but she understands about me using another name. When she was a dancer, she used a lot of other names. Sandy Sherlock is my favorite. She wore a Sherlock Holmes hat and held a big magnifying glass in her hand. It wasn’t a real magnifying glass, though. Those things cost a lot of money, at least the big ones do. I never saw her dance that way, of course, but I’ve heard the stories.

Mom calls me Khyber. She used to call me the unspeakable name when she was angry with me, but I told her that wasn’t fair, so she doesn’t do it anymore.

I call myself Khyber after the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan.

The Khyber Pass is a wild, dangerous place, full of bandits and history. It’s a narrow valley that runs between high mountains, and I’m going to go there some day. I’ll stand in the middle of the valley, and everyone passing through will come up to me and ask, What is your name? and I’ll say, My name is Khyber, and this is my Pass. Maybe they’ll believe me and maybe they won’t, but they’ll go away thinking they’ve met someone who’s very important indeed.

My brothers’ names are David and Daniel. We call them David and Daniel. Sometimes people call them Davy and Danny, but I don’t like it, and I don’t think they do, either.

They’re twins. Most people can’t tell them apart, but most people aren’t as smart as Tammy and me.

I don’t know if they have other names for themselves or not. They hardly ever talk. They’re five years old, so everyone thinks they should be talking, but I figure they have nothing much to say just now. Besides, I talk so much that when they’re around me, they never have a chance to get a word in.

The twins have autism.

Nobody knows what causes autism, but what it means is that my brothers are more often inside their heads than out of them. That makes it hard for them to learn anything, because to learn something, you have to stop thinking your own thoughts long enough for the new information to reach your brain.

Mom reads a lot of books on autism, looking for ways to get the boys out of their heads. When she isn’t reading about autism, she reads about every thing else. She says she’s trying to decide what she wants to be when she grows up. She thinks she’s funny.

Sometimes I let her think so.

The only thing I don’t like about the twins being autistic is that they’re still in diapers. I don’t like changing diapers. Tammy does it most of the time, but sometimes she gets too busy, and then I have to do it. I hate that.

We live in the Regent Park section of Toronto. Regent Park is one of those Cape of Good Hope names. The Cape of Good Hope is the name of that bit of water off the southern tip of Africa. It used to be called the Cape of Storms, because it’s always stormy there. The name was changed to Cape of Good Hope so it wouldn’t frighten the sailors. I’ll bet, though, that not a single sailor going around the Cape of Good Hope was fooled by the change of name.

A regent is someone who rules a country until the real queen or king grows up. A regent is very rich. Everyone in Regent

Reviews for Looking for X

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good, realisitic story about the challenges of living in a single parent home and having to help care for autistic younger siblings.